2017 State Convention Highlights

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2017 State Convention held in Columbia last weekend! We had 54 members check in on Saturday and 39 on Sunday. The MOGP is stronger than ever heading into the 2018 election year when we have the chance to build our power, increase our membership, elevate our values, elect Greens to office, and maintain our ballot access!

The full convention minutes will be emailed out to the membership when they are finished, as different people took minutes for different sections of the convention. Meanwhile, here are the highlights:

We voted in most of the proposed bylaws amendments. Look for the amended bylaws to be posted on the state party website and announced by email soon.

We discussed the democracy plank of our platform & voted on some changes to the committee’s proposal. But we ultimately sent the plank back to the committee for more work.

New Delegates to the Green Party US National Committee are Alison Baldree (KC) and Ron Burch (Joplin) with Elston McCowan (St. Louis) as the alternate delegate.

On Saturday night, some of us we went to Cooper’s Landing for dinner, live music, and the sunset over the Missouri River.

Zay Thompson presented on the political party committee structure the law requires our party to have. His slide show was emailed to the membership.

We used Ranked Choice Voting to decide on a new state party emblem. (See above)

Some state-wide political proposal were accepted:

The MOGP created an Elections Integrity working group with Peter Anger as the point person. The group will work on producing solutions such as a standardized national paper ballot. (See the link below for volunteering to work on this)

The MOGP is committed to collecting 5000 signatures for the CLEAN Missouri petition. http://cleanmissouri.org/ Andrea Ganier is the point person. You can expect more information on coordinated state party efforts soon.

The MOGP Elections Committee was directed to adopt Steve Mann’s two phase strategic plan for 2018 elections preparation. Expect announcements and information on this work as we draw closer to election year.

Government By The People’s efforts on the 7 ballot petitions were endorsed but it will be up to the chapters to decide which ones, if any, to work on. https://governmentbythepeople.org/

The Outreach Coordinators from each chapter will be connecting with each other to discuss setting up statewide Green Action Networks to coordinate activism.

A Presiding Committee was created to work on proposals for MOGP meeting process and to answer questions of process during meetings of the membership. This committee will be a sub-committee of the Organizing Committee. The committee will seek feedback from all the members on their committee work. The committee will be inviting all the chapters to send representatives to sit on the committee.

Thank you to those who volunteered for the following committees. Expect to be contacted soon to get started:

Platform & Policy – Responsible for conducting ongoing platform work, researching and providing recommendations for current issues in Missouri that are more detailed than the platform.

Outreach – Reports to the Coordinating Committee and MOGP meetings concerning environmental and social justice groups that are potential allies of the MOGP, makes recommendations for joint undertakings with these groups, suggests groups that could be invited to make presentations at MOGP meetings, and seek opportunities for MOGP representatives to address other groups.

Communications – Responsible for writing press releases, blogging and emailing Party announcements, creating social media memes and posts, and creating Party literature.

Finance – Develops ideas for raising money for the MOGP and assists the State Treasurer with her/his duties.

Membership – Recruits new members and to helps new chapters get started.

Correspondence – Assists the State Secretary in archiving records and performing other duties involving correspondence.

Huge thanks to the committees that put in many hours of work to make this convention happen!

Convention Committee: Chair Ron Burch, Elston McCowan, Zay Thompson, Jerome Bauer, Vicke Kepling. This group organized all of the logistics for the convention, as well as preparing draft agenda and rules of order for the event with feedback from the membership.

Bylaws Committee: Chair Vicke Kepling, Henry Robertson, CJ Meyers, Don Fitz, Nancy Browning, & Zay Thompson.This group proposed a number of bylaws amendments with feedback from the membership and facilitated the bylaws discussion at the convention.

This was our first two day convention and the first state meeting of the membership since we became an officially recognized party. As a result, some parts of the convention were difficult. We intend to improve our meetings and conventions going forward. We hope that you’ll stick it out with us and we’d love to hear your thoughts on improvement. Please take a moment to fill out the evaluation form emailed to all the members.